Ageing 'modern' wines

Ok it's that old debate again!
Regina Vides is a favourite of mine (given the price not a wine I have huge experience of!)
I have had a couple of vintages of this wine but quite young. It is a modern styled Ribera but really excellent if you like that style. It is a very lush and hedonistic style when young and comes from a top notch producer.
I opened a bottle of the 1998 on Easter Sunday.
A deep ruby red colour no hints of browning.
It says 13% but tastes like more. There's a fair bit of heat/burn on the back palate. There's a hint of glycerol but none of the enjoyable fruit/spice present in its youth. It taste a little 'tired' and I hope that it's just caught in an awkward stage between youth and interesting old age with secondary complexity. Then again it might just be that some of these wines just don't taste as good after a decade in bottle. Also it wasn't a great vintage. And there's the possibility this is a poor bottle. It COULD be heat damaged ! ?

So does anyone have experience of this wine with some age on it?
Is this the fate of modern wines (many of which I like) ?
When they loose the youthful fruit do they loose their charm?
Or is this an awkward teenager/damaged bottle/poor vintage ?

I don't know this wine, Ray, and I don't think it is true with all modern style wines, but it is true that certain modern wines do not age. My tasting group has, for example on at least three occasions, had Contador in a double blind tastings, and each time it had all the earmarks of a wine that just collapsed probably due to some bacterial or stability problem. Allende is a wine that, from the experience of several vintages, I've concluded can only be drunk young. Even a great vintage like 2001 that was somewhat impressive on release is almost kaput - disjointeed oak juice. The top Priorats, to cite another example, do not fall apart so much as slowly fade (although they last well more than a decade). The wines come into better balance with age, but don't really seem to get appreciably more complex. I have no problem with this tragectory of Priorats but, depending on your definition of "age" ...

I hope that this is going through a phase but at 80Euro a bottle I had expected a decade would be achieveable. I have read what you say about Allende before. Thankfully I have had it only on release. I have a lot of wine in Spain 1999 onwards and am beginning to worry !!

Now that I have my entire cellar of Spanish wine all located and more or less organized in a new cellar in our country house, I can confirm that cellar management requires some serious testing of how different wines are evolving and quickly drinking up one's stock of certain wines as appropriate. Terribly hard work. Even if your vintages only go back to 1999, that still will require pruning by accelerated consumption. Again, I don't think there is a compelling reason to be holding '99 Priorats for much longer, for example. I have certainly missed the drinking window of a few wines, such as Allende, and even though one tends to be disappointed in those wines that do meet even conservative aging expectations, it is nevertheless a waste to realize that, with better monitoring, they could have been consumed before they died.

I have quite a few Crianzas as well from 99-01 but I find the likes of Mauro and San Roman seem to hold up pretty well.Buying quicker than I drink sadly. I need to get a move on, my Ribera crianzas/reservas need to be rescued!
Offline near Segovia anyone ??

I had an Allende from... I think it was 96, and it was nice. We had it also blid at our tasting group, and I think many said it may be a Bordeaux. I think I went for Ribera. Anyway I found it entirely different to the 2006 CocaCola, ups, sorry I wanted to say Allende.
A similar experience with a Calvario from 1997, but this time I didn't like it. It wasn't bad, but looked more like a northern Rhone wine than a Rioja, lots of meaty notes, surprising for a tempranillo blend.

Very funny. I remember tasting Calvario once with chef José Andrés and, from the nose alone, we were almost convinced that it was CocaCola!

Terroir??? ;)